Abstract

The laser driven plasma wakefield accelerator is a very compact source of high energy electrons. When the quasi-monoenergetic beam from these accelerators passes through dense material, high energy bremsstrahlung photons are emitted in a collimated beam with high flux. We show how a source based on this emission process can produce more than 109photons per pulse with a mean energy of 10 MeV. We present experimental results that show the feasibility of this method of producing high energy photons and compare the experimental results with GEANT4 Montecarlo simulations, which also give the scaling required to evaluate its suitability as method to produce radioisotopes via photo-nuclear reactions or for imaging applications.

Received 16 November 2011Accepted 24 January 2012Published online 27 March 2012

Acknowledgments:

We acknowledge the support of the U.K. EPSRC and STFC, the Laserlab-Europe consortium and the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project. The work of NRCL was partially supported by the FCT Portugal through the Grant No. SFRH/BD/37838/2007. Over the past decade many current and previous members of the ALPHA-X consortium have made contributions to the project, for which we extend thanks. We also thank David Clark and Tom McCanny for their technical support.